Closing the science-practice gap in management with trainings, seminars and courses

How management practitioners can increase organizational performance

Management practitioners such as executives, managers and professionals are the movers and shakers of the world. It is their decisions that impact whether an organization performs well, mediocre or worse. However, management practitioners cannot directly achieve organizational performance. It is rather the sum of all management decisions they take day in and day out that finally add up to an organization’s performance.

Management knowledge to make the right decisions

There is a huge body of knowledge available that promises to guide management practitioners in taking the right decisions. A closer look at it reveals that a big portion of this knowledge has been created based on anecdotal evidence only and in many cases with commercial interests in mind. Every single day management practitioners are exposed to this type of knowledge in various forms such as business books, trainings, articles and blog posts.

The key messages conveyed are easy answers to complex problems and one fits all receipts that promise exceptional results, but don’t keep up to its promises once implemented. Some of them not just fall short of the promised results, but have the potential to harm an organization and its employees. So what knowledge should management practitioners consider as appropriate to increase organizational performance?

Obstacles management practitioners need to overcome

A small fraction of management knowledge is of high quality and really makes a differences when it comes to organizational performance. However, there are four major obstacles management practitioners need to overcome in order find, understand interpret and implement it:

How to find management knowledge?

How to evaluate management knowledge quality?

How to interpret management knowledge?

How to implement management knowledge?

CQ is the Evidence-based Management Learning Platform

We are a (growing) team of management practitioners and social scientists that decided to join forces and take on the challenge to support executives, managers and professionals in their efforts to increase organizational performance. Our Evidence-based Management Learning Platform CQ which stands for Collaboration Quotient is our contribution to make organizations better and stronger. We achieve this with our dossiers, trainings, seminars and courses.

Bridging the gap between business and social sciences: Our mission

Social sciences are one of the main source of management knowledge. However, it is not just business administration and economics that provides valuable insights for management practitioners. There is much more such as organizational psychology, sociology and behavioral economics management practitioners should consider. CQ’s mission is to bridge the gap between business and social sciences. We achieve this with our evidence based management learning platform that fosters collaboration between both worlds.

Evidence-based Management: Our foundation

Questions about decision making quality have been around for many years now. As a results disciplines such as healthcare, public administration and recently management have started to develop a so called “evidence-based” approach. Evidence-based Management (EBM) urges management practitioners to rely on the best available evidence when making decisions. Inspired by the Evidence-based Medicine approach, Evidence-based Management adapted well proven tools and methodologies to guide practitioners to increase their decision making quality. CQ applies Evidence-based Management principles, tools and methodologies to bridge the gap between business and social sciences.

Critical thinking: Our approach

There is no easy solution to a complex problem. This universal principle is part of CQ’s DNA and reflected in our critical thinking approach. The key assumption behind critical thinking is that one should always question the assumptions underlying an argument and also look at it from a different point of view before considering it as “truth”. This especially applies for busy management professionals that are exposed to a vast amount of information of various quality every day. When we at CQ write our blog posts and dossier or conduct seminars and courses we always try to take a critical stance towards what we read and say.

Dossiers, trainings, seminars and courses: Our contribution

It all started with our desire to learn what really matters and help our organizations to perform better. The first dossiers we wrote guided us on this journey and made us think how we can contribute to help other management practitioners to achieve the same. CQ strongly relies on open source software and supports the open access and open science movement. This made us decide to publish all our dossiers as Open Educational Resources (OER) free to download, adjust and use. In addition, we offer community and paid seminars and short courses on topics that matter for management practitioners like you and us.